Linux Blog

This week I do not have time to write a full fledged article on shell scripting, so I am going to some flow control and logic articles that I wrote that I read the most.

One script that I continuously refer to is one of the first shell scripting articles I wrote titled “When Photoshop Fails.” The reason I refer to this article is because it describes a couple of looping techniques and a loop that works with spaces in filenames. For those interested but do not want to read the whole thing here is the loop in short:

find*-iname"*"|whileread i; doecho"$i"; done

The next article I’m linking to is the one I wrote on loops: http://www.thelinuxblog.com/for-while-and-until-loops-in-bash/ it outlines some of the basic looping techniques. What I fail to mention in this article is that seq can be used to generate sequences of numbers for the [in list] section. The following is how you would create a loop to loop from 1 to 10 echoing out each number:

for i in`seq110`; doecho$i; done;

Select Statements in Bash is exactly what the title implies. How to implement select statements in bash scripting. Also known as switch’s and case’s in other languages many will be familiar with this sort of logic. Even though I do not refer to it as often as some of the other articles I think it is worth of a mention in this list.

Decision making using if statements is something that every shell scripter is bound to come across. While not exactly the most in depth article on bash if then else statements it is a good start for any one wanting to learn more.

I love dialog’s and it just so happens that dialog and xdialog do a great job of making dialogs for your shell scripts. Creating Dialogs with Dialog has some basic uses of dialog. While it is not exactly logic or flow control, it can be used to prompt the user for input or just to pretty things up a little. It just so happens that it has an X front end called xdialog which does a good job too.

This is not all of the articles I refer to, but its the ones I wrote. If any one else has a list of articles they refer to that are bookmarked that I wrote or not I’d be interested to see them. Just paste them in a comment.